The Nullness Analyser of Julia

This experimental paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a static nullness analyser for single-threaded Java and Java bytecode programs, built inside the julia tool. Nullness analysis determines, at compile-time, those program points where the null value might be dereferenced, leading to a run-time exception. In order to improve the quality of software, it is important to prove that such situation does not occur. Our analyser is based on a denotational abstract interpretation of Java bytecode through Boolean logical formulas, strengthened with a set of denotational and constraint-based supporting analyses for locally non-null fields and full arrays and collections. The complete integration of all such analyses results in a correct system of very high precision whose time of analysis remains in the order of minutes, as we show with some examples of analysis of large software.